Andrés Segovia’s 1912 Manuel Ramirez Guitar
My Latest Classical Guitar With an Elevated Fretboard
My latest guitar is based on R.E. Bruné’s plans of Andrés Segovia’s 1912 Manuel Ramirez guitar, the guitar has the same plantilla (outline), headstock, headstock crest and binding scheme as the Ramirez and that is where the similarities end. The original guitar has a spruce top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides, I used a master grade old growth western red cedar with a Lorenzo Frignani style rosette, the back and sides are East Indian rosewood, and the back has an inner lamination of western red cedar. I took the idea of the lamination from a 1992 Manuel Contreras guitar that I worked on several years ago
Looking at the inside of the top, the bracing is a simplified version of the Kasha/Schneider guitar bracing.
Inside of the back, looking at the spruce bracing over a lamination of western red cedar. A very long time ago, I saw a photo of a Hermann Hauser guitar that had a spruce lamination on the back.
The back is some very old East Indian rosewood.
In the next two photos you can see that this guitar has an elevated fretboard…
…this is the first time I have made a guitar with this feature. I decided to add the elevated fretboard after noticing that nearly every major concertizing classical guitarist performs on a guitar with such a fretboard.
Yesterday I put on the low and high “e” strings to get an idea of what this guitar will sound like once it is finished, IT IS LOUD! Its voice, and the beauty of its voice, will reach the back of a concert and what will be more important is that its beauty will help the musician bring the audience to the music. My last four guitars were all based on this 1912 Ramirez guitar and were quite impressive, I will post more about using Ramirez’s guitar as model for my work.
I often hear that the classical guitars made by the early 20th century masters aren’t suitable for playing today’s modern music. Last night I listened to Wulfin Lieske’s Taqsim I-III, it is all music that Lieske composed, recorded in 2004 and he performs all of the works on his 1912 Manuel Ramirez guitar. You should give that recording a listen, that old guitar sure doesn’t sound like “an old guitar”, it sounds pretty modern to me!